Four Oklahoma teenagers saved the life of a 90-year-old woman by breaking into her burning house and carrying her to safety.
Nick Byrd, Seth Byrd, Wyatt Hall, and Dylan Wick, who range in age from 14 to 16, worked together to warn neighbors, alert the authorities, and save Catherine Ritchie after her house caught fire.
The four boys, all football players, were staying at Hall’s house for the evening in Sapulpa, Okla., outside of Tulsa. Across the street around 9 p.m., Ritchie was preparing to go to sleep when she entered her bedroom and saw her bed in flames, according to a blog post by Ritchie’s daughter, Missy Ritchie Nicholas.
Ritchie tried to put the fire out herself before becoming disoriented from the smoke and heat. She attempted to escape but ended up walking into her closet several times thinking it was the exit to the hallway.
The boys saw the flames and two went for the house while the others called 911 and went house to house alerting neighbors. Nick Byrd was the first inside Ritchie’s home, kicking in the back door. He found Ritchie lying in the hallway to her bedroom and, together with his brother, carried her out of the house.
“Thank you for being the kind of young men who thought about another person above yourselves,” Ritchie Nicholas wrote on her blog. “Thank you for staying safe yourselves as well. Thank you to your parents who obviously raised you in such a way that [led] to you making life saving and heroic decisions on behalf of someone else.”
